Author: S. T. Joshi

Some months ago, a conservative firebrand named Kevin Williamson was chosen as a columnist for the venerable magazine The Atlantic. The thinking, evidently, was that the magazine’s generally liberal readership might profit (it was never clarified exactly how) by absorbing a point of view remote from and generally hostile to its customary presuppositions. But then …

To those of us who wondered when, if ever, a significant majority of Americans would develop a shuddering loathing of the appalling gun violence that occurs daily in this country—rather than passing it off with callous indifference as some sort of inevitable, unavoidable by-product of the “price of freedom”—I can now say: The time is now. …

Gore Vidal, a laureate of the International Academy of Humanism (a Council for Secular Humanism program), recently died at the age of eighty-six. Academy secretary Stephen Law said: “Gore Vidal has been an inspirational figure to a great many people, myself included. Of course, he will be remembered for being urbane, fiendishly talented, and terrifyingly …